Islam's Role in History
From: Tarjei Straume
Date: Sun Jan 4, 2004 10:46 pm
Subject: Islam's role in history
Below is a very interesting supplement to
the previously quoted lectures about Islam, 666, the Beast, and
Sorat as recorded in "The Book of Revelation and the Work
of the Priest" (GA 346):
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/anthroposophy_tomorrow/message/25
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/anthroposophy_tomorrow/message/583
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/anthroposophy_tomorrow/message/593
What is interesting is that the lectures to
CC priests were the very last ones held by Steiner (September
1924) before he became too ill to continue. During and after
the Great War, he woke up to the very fierceness of the Opposing
Powers, making it incumbent upon him to speak out loud and clear
about the secret occult societies in England, about Sorat and
the mystery of 666 and its relation to Islam in Europe and other
things.
Thirteen years earlier, in 1911, Rudolf Steiner's
look to the future was considerably more relaxed and optimistic.
The powerful opposotion to his work wielded by enemy occultists
and the Spirits behind them did not start until after he had
held the lecture cycle "From Jesus to Christ" (GA 131)
in October of that year; the headaches with Besant and Leadbeater
in the Theosophical Society and Max Heindel's plagiarism exploited
by his opponents were only irritating mosquito bites compared
to what was to come when the hostility of occult powers had been
awoken by "From Jesus to Christ" - a hostility leading
to the very outbreak of the Great War in 1914, which disturbed
the spiritual atmosphere so severly that Steiner had to discontinue
his investigations of the Gospels, the Holy of Holies.
But in March 1911, none of this had happened,
and Rudolf Steiner saw no immediate need to warn against Sorat
and the 666 Mystery in relation to Islam in Europe. So in this
lecture, we see a rather benevolent and progressive and fruitful
intersection of spiritual-cultural streams. He does not speak
here about what happens every 666 years, but about every sixth
century. In other words, the link to the Apocalyptic secret is
veiled in this lecture, and what he revealed to the CC priests
about this in 1924 was not given to the general public until
the 1990's.
Excerpting the lecture at hand is almost like
dissecting it; it's not like my other recent quotes that could
better stand on their own in a way. But I'll give it a try. There
is indeed a connection between Jahve and Allah; what they have
in common is the Moon. In Jahve we have the full moon; in Islam
the crescent moon. They reflect the Light from the Christ, who
is the Sun. And then we move on to the repetition of epochs:
"In post-Atlantean evolution
we have distinguished seven epochs: the Old Indian, then in sequence,
the Old Persian, the Egypto-Chaldean, the Graeco-Latin - during
which the Christ event took place - and our own fifth epoch which
will be followed by two others. In the fifth epoch, certain happenings
characteristic of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch are repeated in a
different form. The Christ Impulse was given in the middle epoch
(the fourth) and the third epoch is in a certain sense repeated
in the fifth. There is a similar relationship between the sixth
and the second epochs and between the seventh and the first.
Here we are concerned with overlapping factors of evolution which
will reveal themselves in such a way that we can apply to them
the Biblical saying: The first shall be tha last. The Old Indian
epoch will reappear in the seventh in a different but nevertheless
recognizable form."
- "Background to the Gospel of St. Mark"
Lecture 9: "The Moon-Religion of Yahve and its Reflection
in Arabism - The Penetration of the Buddha-Mercury Stream Into
Rosicrucianism" (Berlin, 13th March, 1911, GA 124)
"But many that are first
shall be last; and the last shall be first." - Mt 19:30
The line it is drawn, the
curse it is cast
The slow one now will later be fast
As the present now will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'
- Bob Dylan, 1963
And the Doctor continues:
There is, however, still another
way in which an earlier epoch may have an effect in a later one.
Shorter periods may also occur in the course of evolution. Thus
conditions present in pre-Christian times during the period of
ancient Hebrew culture reappeared later in post-Christian times:
something that was prepared within the Jahve- or Jehovah-religion,
overlapping the Christ Impulse as it were, appeared again and
played into the other factors which had by then developed.
........
Taking the Moon, contrasted
with the Sun, as the symbol representing the Jahve-religion,
we may expect that a similar form of belief, by-passing as it
were the Christ Impulse, would emerge later on as a kind of Moon-religion.
And this is what actually happened. The old Jahve-religion emerged
again after the Christ Event, in the religion of the Crescent,
carrying earlier impulses into post-Christian times. If you do
not take things superficially, the use of the Moon and Crescent
as symbols for these two faiths will not be something to smile
at, for it is an actual fact that a religion or creed and its
symbol are intimately connected. So in a later time we have the
repetition of an earlier phase which has skipped the intervening
years. This takes place in the last third of the Graeco-Latin
epoch which in the occult sense we reckon as lasting up to the
twelfth and into the thirteenth century. Leaving out a period
of six hundred years, this means that beginning in the sixth
century A.D. and exercising a very rigorous influence upon all
aspects of development, we have the religion brought by the Arabians
from Africa over into Spain: this represents a re-emergence,
in a different form, of the Jahve-Moon-religion. The intervening
Christ Impulse has been ignored. It is not possible to enumerate
all the characteristics brought over with the religion of Mohammed;
but it is important to realize that the Christ Impulse is disregarded
in the religion of Islam which was actually a kind of revival
of Mosaic monotheism. This idea of the One God, however, included
a good deal derived from other sources, for instance from Egypto-Chaldean
religion, which had yielded very exact knowledge of the connection
of happenings in the starry heavens with earthly events. Thus
the thoughts and ideas current among the Egyptians, chaldeans,
Babylonians and Assyrians appear again in the religion of Mohammed
but pervaded by the One God, Jahve. Speaking scientifically,
what we have in Arabism is a kind of gathering-together, a synthesis,
of the wisdom-teachings of the priests of Egypt and Chaldea and
the Jahve-religion of the ancient Hebrews.
In such a process there is
not only compression but also rejection and elimination. In this
case everything connected with clairvoyant perception had to
be discarded and men were to depend entirely upon reason and
intellectual thinking. Hence the concepts belonging to the Egyptian
art of healing and to Chaldean astronomy - which in both these
peoples were the outcome of clairvoyance - are to be found in
the Arabism of Mohammed in an intellectualized and individualized
form. Something that had passed as it were through a filter was
thus brought into Europe by the Arabians. Old concepts that had
been current among the Egyptians and Chaldeans were denuded of
their visionary, pictorial content and re-cast into abstract
forms. They reappear in the wonderful scientific knowledge possessed
by the Arabians who made their way into Europe via Africa and
Spain. Whereas Christianity brought an impulse connected essentially
with man's life of soul, the greatest impulse given to the human
intellect was brought by the Arabians. Without thorough knowledge
of the course taken by the evolution of humanity it is impossible
to form any idea of how much the world-conception which arose
in a new form under the symbol of the Moon, has given to mankind.
There could have been no Kepler, no Galileo, without the impulses
brought by Arabism into Eurpoe. For the old mode of thinking
appears again, but now denuded of its ancient clairvoyance, when
the third culture-epoch celebrated its resurrection in our own
fifth epoch, in our modern astronomy, in our modern science.
Thus the course of evolution
is such that on the one hand the Christ Impulse penetrates into
the European peoples directly, through Greece and italy, and
on the other hand a more southerly stream by-passes Greece and
Italy and unites with the influences brought indirectly by the
Arabians.
Only through the union of
christianity and Mohammedanism during the important period wioth
which we are dealing, was it possible for our modern culture
to come into being. For reasons which I cannot go into today
we have to reckon with periods of six to six-and-a-half centuries
for such impulses as I have been describing. Thus actually six
centuries after the Christ Event the renewed Moon-cult of the
Arabians appears, expanding and spreading into Europe, and until
the thirteenth century enriching the Christian culture which
had received its direct impulses by other paths. There was an
unbroken interchange of thought. If you are conversant merely
with the outer course of events, if you know how in the monasteries
of Western Europe - in spite of apparent opposition to Arabism
- the Arabian concepts made their way into science, you will
also be aware that until the middle of the thirteenth century
- again a particularly significant point of time - the Arabian
impulse and the direct Christ Impulse were interwoven."
- ibid
Tarjei
http://uncletaz.com/
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